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Recently I needed to get a list of VMware vCO workflows from a remote server using PowerShell. A colleague of mine pointed me in the right direction by providing me with a URL to access the vCO Rest API on, as well as letting me know what I needed to send in order to authenticate.

To connect and retrieve content back in the PowerShell example below, we’ll need to:

Access the Rest API URL for Orchestrator using a web client object

Send basic authentication in the header of our request

Notes:

One thing I did notice is that when you use your web browser to test the URL, the result is returned to you as XML, however when I used a web client object in PowerShell, I got a result returned to me in JSON. The PowerShell script below is therefore tailored to interpret the result as JSON. This being so, you’ll need to make sure you are using PowerShell 3.0 or above, as the ConvertFrom-Json cmdlet is only available using PowerShell 3.0 and above.

When sending your authentication details with the web client object request, make sure your username/password combo are used in this format:

Authorization: Basic username:password

This means that your header you add to your web client option, should be added with the string as per the above, but with the username:password part encoded using base64. The script below takes this all into account, and all you need to do is provide your username and password for vCenter Orchestrator to the PowerShell function, it will handle the base64 encoding and passing of the values to the web client itself.

Anyway, enough of that, let us get onto the actual script itself. This is presented as a PowerShell function. Load it into your session (copy-paste) or add it to your PS profile for future use. Apologies for the formatting – Syntax Highlighter really messes with the formatting and nice clean indentation I normally have in my scripts!

Here is a direct download of the PowerShell script if the script paste below doesn’t work for you:

I am very honored to have received VMware vExpert recognition for 2014 (the third year running now). Keeping this blog updated with new content has proven a difficult task as of late with many more work and personal commitments on the go, in addition to a second blog I started relating to my hobby of game development (and coding).